California’s reparations dream faces stark reality

California made history when it convened a task force in 2021 to study how the state could atone for its legacy of slavery and discrimination. Last year, the task force approved its report with more than 100 recommendations and urged lawmakers to turn them into law. Then in February, the California Legislative Black Caucus introduced a package of more than a dozen proposals inspired by the task force’s recommendations. However, contending with a multibillion dollar budget deficit, the bills introduced so far do not include a proposal to provide direct payments to the descendants of enslaved Black people—which frustrated many advocates of reparations. The estimates for the total cost had run as high as $800 billion, almost three times California’s annual budget. Now, as the nation marks another Juneteenth, celebrating the day when the last enslaved people in the U.S. learned they were free, California lawmakers are having to compromise on the measures that have been introduced, to build support and ensure that some of the task force’s recommendations become a reality in the state. “Reparations, as the public have come to understand them, are not popular,” Giuliana Perrone, a historian and professor at the University of California Santa Barbara,...